Global Village and Internet

When I was growing up, I never got to see a mobile phone until I was in class 7, I owned one when I was in form four. The telecom booth were physically available at the local village town, communication was slow but no one noticed it, data was not important, in fact it was insignificant. Inter-connectivity was unthinkable, actually there was nothing to interconnect. Those were the days when Nairobi as a capital city existed virtually in my mind.

The internet is the backbone of a global village, it has revolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing before. The invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer set the stage for this unprecedented integration of capabilities and the step 001A towards building a global village.

The Internet is at once a world-wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers and of late any gadget without regard for geographic location. The Internet is among the greatest wave that revolutionize the way people lived, living and will live.

We are now in an era whereby the world is a single community linked by telecommunications, gadgets, social media and cloud computing. (GLOBAL VILLAGE). With the interconnection, the world has become smarter, information is now as far as opening a google search, dating is as soon as opening a social site and employment is as easy as dialing a single call or pressing that send button on the email. In my campus life, I spent lot of time reading big database and programming books, the knowledge I learnt in a whole semester can now be achieved by just watching a YouTube clip which is more elaborate, straight to the point and practical.

A global village is about having access to everything as you would access your kitchen from your table room. When you are sick you download a doctor app, you want to date, you log in to the various social sites, your agriculture products are due you sell via mkulima bora, you want to attend a lecture class you log to eLearning, you want a taxi you use uber, you want to travel to abroad you set up a teleconference hall in your dormitory.

As we focus on making the world a global village, cloud computing and API integration have also emerged and created more job opportunities. You can now integrate lots of platform in one project just by calling the APIs and using cloud computing. For an efficient global village, reliable internet is core, infrastructure is expensive and important too.

But how can we balance between cost and efficiency of infrastructure?

Various government had invested heavily in the telecom booth back those analog days, a country like Uganda the booth are still in operations in Kenya most of them have been faced off. Imagine if all those telecom booth would be modified to be a hotspot in the town of location, the government would just need to replace the telephone modular connectors with the new fiber technology and that would give a boost to the new urge of a more connected digital village.

A global village is a result of a smart village and a digital village, the most people who propel this world into the next curve are the startups, people who are less connected and looking for ways to do so, innovators who have ideas and don’t have cash to implement them and so they are looking for the cheapest, efficient way to do so and people who are passionate about cloud computing.

Internet Balloon and The Project Loon

According to Wikipedia, Project Loon is a research and development project being developed by Google X with the mission of providing Internet access to rural and remote areas. The project uses high-altitude balloons placed in the stratosphere at an altitude of about 18 km (11 mi) to create an aerial wireless network with up to 4G-LTE speeds. It was named Project Loon, since Google itself found the very idea of providing internet access to the remaining 5 billion population unprecedented and “crazy.

The internet balloon will bring a new face to the global village, challenges in the connectivity in the rural areas will have been solved, internet connectivity will be like installing a DSTV dish, 5 Billion people will be now be part of the global village, what this means is that any idea or solution that you expose to the internet it will have a new market of over 5 billion. Many would argue that google, Facebook, twitter and linked in will be the major beneficiaries, but on my opinion the winner will be the big data world.

Big Data

People keep asking about big data……….HADOOP

In simple explanation; long time ago people employed people to key in data into the machines, those days data was not so much. After some time people started keying in their own data into the machine and the data increased.

Then people or machines used Relational databases to go through and analyze these data since they were not much.

After Google came into place and social media became an addiction, data skyrocketed and now not only people are keying/generating data but even machine are generating data and keying in in real time, and this has made data increase in Velocity, Volume and Variety.

Earlier when data was less and manageable, data ‘went’ to machines (relational Databases)to be processed but nowadays since data has skyrocket we are having machines (more than one) going to process a certain data concurrently (multiple relational databases executing and analyzing the same data in parallel ) = (HADOOP)

Adding 5billion people to the grid will skyrocket the data generated daily, analyzing will be a nightmare.

However imagine this; (tweeter case example)

twit

1. There are over 500 million tweets every day that is flowing every second (High Volume& Velocity)
2. We have to understand what each tweet means – where is it from, what kind of a person is tweeting, is it trustworthy or not. (High Variety)
3. Identify the sentiment – is this person talking negative about iPhone or positive? (High Complexity)
4. We need to have a way to quantify the sentiment and track it in real time. (High Variability)                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Internet is becoming the capital city of the global village, the capital city still have traffic jams (data) but we all remember that the internet was never developed for security and so will the insecurity still exist

by Savio Wambugu